Virtual reality headset devices allow users to view media in an immersive environment. For example, virtual reality headset devices allow users to experience more complex and realistic environments by displaying two or three-dimensional content, or simulated three-dimensional content. To illustrate, many virtual reality headset devices are capable of displaying three-dimensional movies, video games, scenes, or simulations that allow users to interact with the virtual reality environment.
When interacting with a virtual reality environment, conventional virtual reality headset devices use a variety of different techniques for users to provide input to interact with a virtual reality environment. Specifically, some conventional virtual reality devices allow users to provide input by way of one or more cameras capturing a user's hand gestures, such as pointing gestures, pinching gestures, or hand movements. Hand gestures, however, require the use of cameras and large amounts of computation, which can reduce battery life and increase the costs associated with the virtual reality devices. Additionally, hand recognition is often not reliable, and hardware designed to recognize hand motions frequently fail to recognize or incorrectly interpret hand motions. Moreover, users often find the use of hand gestures as complicated, especially when there is a lack of an intuitive connection between a desired input and a corresponding hand gesture.
Alternatively, some virtual reality headset devices allow users to provide input to interact using touch gestures on small touch interfaces on the side of the headset. However, while using the side touch surface, users are unable to see their fingers, which are outside of the virtual reality headset device. Because users cannot see their fingers, conventional touch gestures and interpretation of gestures are less intuitive, more cumbersome, and otherwise undesirable. For example, on a touch screen device on a mobile phone, the user is able to look at the screen and their finger as the user taps on an icon on the screen to select the icon. In contrast, with a virtual reality headset with the image inside the headset and the finger outside the headset, the user in unable to see where the finger is in relation to the image. Moreover, the user is not tapping on the image itself so there is not intuitive understanding of where the user taps corresponding to something on the display. Existing touch techniques thus often do not work well for selecting displayed items and providing other types of user input on a virtual reality headset device. These and other disadvantages exist with respect to virtual reality user input techniques.